The circle is now complete
Over the years I have often felt the need to revisit something from my childhood, from vintage toys to long-lost friends. With the advent of ubiquitous Internet access and eBay, etc., this became easier and easier over time.
In the past several days I have written a lot about my elementary school friends Jon, David, and Sarah. David accompanied me to high school and I’ve kept in touch with him on and off, but Jon and Sarah more or less fell off the face of the earth — until last week, when my occasional googling suddenly turned up some unwelcome but definitive news about Jon. Sarah was a harder problem; her last name was a very common one, and finding her was like finding a needle in a haystack. And yet yesterday, David found Sarah online without any apparent effort! We’re now back in touch with each other after about a quarter century. “Why now?” Sarah asked me in e-mail.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I believe I have now managed to track down everything that used to be important to me — every obscure pop-culture memory, every hard-to-find candy treat, every depiction of what my old neighborhood was like long ago, and now every close friend. I have fully mined my past.
Nothing left but the future now, I guess. And just in time for the big 4-0. Onward!
September 19th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
I still want to know what I win…
September 28th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
[...] (Sarah thought he was saying “feces.”) [...]
October 13th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
[...] At any other time I probably would have brushed him off with a wave of my hand and a mumbled apology. But in the past few days I’ve traded e-mail with Sarah reminiscing about (a) my bar mitzvah and (b) the time in 1980 when she convinced her Irish mom to let her skip school (in order to accompany me to the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back) on the grounds that it was the Jewish holiday Shavuot. [...]
December 30th, 2006 at 2:10 am
[...] All of which makes him out to be rather a saint, which may indeed be appropriate but is also rather depersonalizing. When I knew him he was just an uncommonly fun friend, part of my inner circle. We hung out, played games, hatched schemes, acted silly. [...]